August 18, 2019: Year C, 10 Pentecost, Proper 15

Thankful Memorial Episcopal Church

Isaiah 5:1-7; Psalm 80:1-2, 8-18; Hebrews 11:29-12:2; Luke 12:49-56

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.  Amen.

You know, when I was planning the dates of my sabbatical, I should have looked at the lectionary before choosing my first Sunday back, because these readings don’t really say “Glad to be back!” or “Gosh I missed y’all” very well. 

My last Sunday before sabbatical was in May; we celebrated Good Shepherd Sunday and baptized three children.  Three months ago, I left you in the loving and comforting hands of Jesus, the Good Shepherd and I come back today to find you all at the mercy of Jesus, the Angry Arsonist! 

It’s a dramatic shift.  “I came to bring fire to the earth, and how I wish it were already kindled!” cries Jesus in Luke’s gospel today.  He goes on: “Do you think that I have come to bring peace to the earth?  No, I tell you, but rather division!  From now on five in one household will be divided, three against two and two against three; they will be divided: father against son and son against father, mother against daughter and daughter against mother…”  This Jesus seems a far cry from that Good Shepherd last May, or even from the Jesus at whose birth the angels in Luke’s gospel foretold “Peace on earth!” or the Jesus who a few chapters ago told a woman that her faith had healed her and she might go “in peace.” 

And yet, I think there is a common thread between all these “Jesuses,” and that is his passion – for God’s people, for God’s creation, for God’s kingdom – that ideal-made-real when God’s justice and mercy and righteousness and love, when God’s peace will overfill the world. 

And it is Jesus’ passion that we see on full display in his words here in Luke’s gospel.  Beneath the harsh language lies his deep-seated, stop-at-nothing desire to do whatever it takes to make God’s kingdom a reality in this “present time.”  As one commentator puts it, for Jesus, it’s “shalom or bust.”[i]  Or, perhaps we’d do better to say that for Jesus, it’s shalom and bust, or bust on the way to shalom. 

For God’s peace, God’s shalom, is something very different from peace for the sake of politeness, from the false peace that happens when we are just avoiding conflict.  Shalom happens when we each as individuals and all of us together have faced the hard truths of our sinfulness – how we daily hurt others and how the systems we participate in hurt, break and oppress others, too.  Shalom is what happens when we face these truths and, in our hearts, repent of them, and in our words and actions, work to change them.  And those words, those actions, may very well ruffle some feathers, to say the least.  They may threaten the human systems that many of us hold dear.  And they often serve to “cast down the mighty from their thrones,” as Jesus’ mother once said, to “exalt the lowly,” to “fill the hungry with good things” and to send “the rich away empty.”  And when you start rocking the boat in that way, well… the boat tends to rock you right back.  And you might start seeing, for example, “five in one household … divided, three against two and two against three.”

But in today’s gospel, Jesus reminds us that such division is to be expected when you’re working for the kingdom, that you’re bound to disrupt the world’s peace a little – or a lot – if you’re working towards the peace that passes all understanding.  And while that disruption and division may not be pleasant, while it may be difficult and demanding and even destructive at times, it is nonetheless necessary. 

And the division Jesus talks about in Luke’s gospel this morning isn’t just a description of what happens in the world around us when we do kingdom work.  I think it must also be a description of what happens within us if and when we take on discipleship seriously, when we follow Jesus on the way to God’s kingdom. 

Because the change that Jesus is so passionate about isn’t just for the world without but also for the people we are within.  And making those radical changes in our hearts and minds and lives – what Scripture calls “repentance” – can often feel really disruptive and divisive and damaging, too. 

Commentator Scott Hoezee imagines this process as like having Jesus move in to do some significant remodeling.  He writes: “Jesus doesn’t want to move into the house of our hearts just to slap on a few coats of fresh paint… No, when Jesus moves in he brings a wrecking ball to tear down whole walls, gut the rooms down to the studs and basically build a whole new house… We want to baptize the various practices of our lives with a nice sprinkling of fresh water.  Jesus’ Spirit comes to us with a baptism of fire that burns up our lives and starts all over.”[ii]

And I would go even further than Hoezee does.  The way he describes it, it sounds like once you’ve let Jesus in to do the renovation, to “flip” your heart, expensive though that process may have been, you can now relax.  Your heart’s been flipped and you’re good to go.  But, my experience – and maybe yours, too – is that the real difficulty of discipleship, the real cost, is that Jesus calls us to go through this process of heart-flipping again and again and again.  Because just as soon as we’ve done the hard work of repentance, we’re bound to discover yet another aspect of our brokenness, our sinfulness and wrong-doing. 

And so we’re left face to face, over and over again, with Jesus, the Angry Arsonist. It’s not a particularly fun place to be, for any of us.  It’s hard and it’s scary and it’s uncomfortable and sometimes it’s painful.  But, here’s the good news: in its own way, it’s also unexpectedly refreshing.  There is something surprisingly freeing with being forced to start anew.  So, maybe after all, this text isn’t so wrong for starting again as rector and people of Thankful Memorial now that I’m back from sabbatical.  We haven’t had to burn down our buildings, thankfully, but I am nonetheless looking forward to starting afresh our work together, with Christ Jesus.

Because the truth is, each time God’s wrecking ball starts renovating our hearts, each time we allow the Holy Arsonist to confront our racism and egotism and snobbishness and burn it away, each time we let God’s Spirit wield her fire against our selfishness and greed and lust for power, we come one step closer to knowing the peace that passes all understanding and one step closer to seeing the kingdom of God made real on earth.  Amen.

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[i] Debie Thomas.  “Disturbing the Peace” at Journey With Jesus: https://www.journeywithjesus.net/essays/2305-disturbing-the-peace

[ii] Scott Hoezee.  “Luke 12:49-56” in “Sermon Starters” at The Center for Excellence in Preaching: https://cep.calvinseminary.edu/sermon-starters/proper-15c-2/